When exporting Play Store reviews, there are a few things to consider before choosing the best solution for your use case:
- Is it your app, and do you have access to the Play Store Console?
- Do you need data just this once, or is this more of a recurring need – For example monthly, weekly or daily?
- Do you need data for all stores (countries) or just the one store?
- Do you need data only from the Play Store, or are you hoping to aggregate data from other review platforms as well?
In this post, I’ll go through X ways to export Play Store reviews, and I’ll try to point out when each option is best, depending on your answer to the 4 questions above.
#1 Using the Play Console
When to use this method
- You have access to the app’s Play Console
- You need data every few weeks
- You need data for all stores (countries)
- You only need data from the Play Store
If you have access to the Play Console and you’re trying to download your own reviews, just this once, you’re golden.
Head over to the Play Console, click “Download Reports”, and select “Reviews”. Select the application you want to download reviews for, and a time range, and voilà. You’re done.
If you’re stuck, this post explains in greater detail the different steps required to get to an export of your reviews.
#2 Using Reviewflowz’s Pay As You Go Exports
When to use this method
- You do not have access to the app’s Play Console
- You need data just this once
- You need data from all stores (countries)
- Your time is worth more than $100 / hour.
Now you might think I’m biased, and I very well might be.
But I have not found a single other option that could get you thousands of Play Store reviews in minutes, without having you sign up to all sorts of things, configuring all sorts of things, or subscribing to stuff you don’t need.
If you have a one-time requirement to access reviews for any application – including one you don’t own, operate, or have access to – just head over to our exports page, and buy an export at $0.10 per review.
By default, we’ll export reviews for all countries in which the app has reviews. The country dropdown on the search form is here to allow us to find the app. The search is powered by Google’s own search engine, which is country dependent.
If your app is available in the US, you can leave the default. If it isn’t available in the US, pick any country in which you know the app is listed.
Once we’ve found your app, you can export a free sample with 25 reviews, or purchase the whole file for $0.10 per review.
If you have high volume or specific requirements, feel free to reach out, our custom exports start at $500 with a considerably lower price per review.
Here’s what an export looks like for reference.
#3 Using a Python or Node JS library
When to use this method
- You do not have access to the app’s Play Console
- You need data fairly frequently
- You need data for all stores (countries), or some stores only, or some complex combinations
- You need data from the Play Store only
- Your time is worth less than $100 / hour or you need review data for hundreds of apps.
There are basically 2 libraries that I recommend looking into if you want to set this up on your own:
- The Python google-play-scraper library works fine for reviews, you’ll need to figure out the appId (the ?id= parameter on the url) and country code you want to get reviews for. If you need to access reviews for all countries, here’s a list from Google’s documentation.
- The equivalent Node JS library which I have not tested recently, but pretty much works the same way (the author credits the python library).
Now, depending on the use-case, you’ll need to look into a few extra things
- Deduplication – You can use Google’s internal ID, but watch out for review updates & deletions, you’ll need custom logic for those – Updates, for example, share the same Google ID.
- Looping – If you’re hoping to pull the most recent reviews only on each iteration, you’ll need some sort of logic to figure out when to stop for each store (country). Depending on the scale you’re looking at, there are many gotchas here to set up a fast database with the right indices.
- Throttling – When you hit the Google Play server too much in too little time, you’ll start getting 503s and requests from your IP will be blocked for a while. It’s always a good idea to implement smooth throttling, but you might also need to set up IP rotation logic using proxy services.
- Volume – It appears the libraries now struggle to collect more than a few hundred reviews from the Play Store. This tutorial (with code samples) goes into great detail to explain how to work around that while still leveraging the library.
#4 Using Export Comments
When to use this method
- You do not have access to the app’s Play Console
- You need data for some stores only
- Your time is worth more than $100 / hour
I tried their engine several times across a few days, and it always said I had reached my limit.
So I can’t really tell you if it works, and I think it’s hardly maintained (if at all).
Their trustpilot reviews seem to show they’re doing this in good faith though. Especially if you read the negative ones, you can see they’re clearly from unreasonable customers.
$15 should get you up to 5000 reviews but you’ll have to load each URL (country, app, etc) manually. The main issue is that if you run into a problem, it could take a few days to get an answer.
#5 Using a template on a generic scraping platform
Do not ever use this method
Again, call me biased if you’d like.
Realistically though, here’s what you’re in for
- You’ll need to subscribe to some generic platform like Octoparse, Bardeen, Pavuk, or whatever that claims they can do it all.
- Those platforms will most often scrape the Play Store’s front end, booting a browser, and collecting reviews in increments of 20, loading images, ads, css, js, and a whole bunch of other things you do not need. Long story short, you’re in for a solid few hours of waiting (at best) or iterating (most likely) to fix IP blocking, 503 errors, etc.
- Most of those platforms won’t work with special characters (because of the way they access the data in the first place). In most cases, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin or Cyrillic characters won’t make it to your export.
#6 Using Reviewflowz’s monitoring solutions
When to use this method
- You need data regularly (daily or weekly)
- You need data for all countries, or some countries, or some combination
- You need data from the Play Store, and possibly from other countries
- Your time is worth more than $100 / hour
If you need to access Play Store data easily, regularly, and without having to figure out deduplication, scraping, or anything else really, Reviewflowz is built for you.
While no access is required to collect any app’s reviews, you can still connect to the Play Console if you’re monitoring your own reviews, to be able to reply directly or automatically using AI.
But Reviewflowz makes the most sense if you need review data for several review platforms. We’ll collect, deduplicate, clean up, detect language, etc. under a single, unique schema. No more wrappers, no more data cleaning. You’re saving hours of grunt work.
You can export reviews to CSV, use webhooks to automatically synchronise with an external service, access our built-in analytics, and send review notifications to Slack, MS Teams, or Email.
You can also leverage our API to poll for new reviews on a regular basis if you’re dealing with a high volume of data.
Prices start from $15 / month / review profile – i.e. an app on the Play Store, or a listing on Google My Business for example – and we offer volume discounts.
Our pricing page has more details about our plans, and we’re happy to answer questions if you have any!
Going further
I hope this post helped you understand how best to get to the data you need.
If you need to download reviews from the App Store, Google My Business, or G2, one of the links below might be helpful
